Scribd Expands Audiobook Catalog in Deal With Penguin Random House

E-book subscription services are bulking up and expanding their libraries and services as the competition to become the Netflix of books escalates. On Thursday, the subscription reading service Scribd announced that it would add more than 9,000 audiobooks from Penguin Random House Audio to its platform, increasing its audiobook catalog to more than 45,000 titles.

The deal will give Scribd’s subscribers access to narrations of popular titles by authors like Lena Dunham, John Grisham, Gillian Flynn and George R. R. Martin.

“Since we launched audiobooks last fall, reading time on Scribd has doubled,” Trip Adler, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “This is great news for Scribd and for our publishing partners.”

Mr. Adler said in an email that 84 percent of people listening to audiobooks on the service also read e-books. “That crossover activity is a gold mine for publishers,” he said.

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Trip Adler, chief executive of Scribd, said 84 percent of people listening to audiobooks on the service also read e-books.CreditJeff Chiu/Associated Press

Like Amazon and Netflix, which are locked in a struggle to become the leading service for streaming TV shows and movies, book subscription start-ups are jockeying for content deals with major publishers and striving to outdo one another with splashy add-on services.

Another start-up, Playster, a multimedia subscription service that has e-books, music, TV shows, movies and games, recently announced that it had reached an agreement with Simon & Schuster to feature titles from its backlist, books kept in print after their initial release. The company’s growing e-book library already includes 14,000 backlist titles from HarperCollins.

Amazon’s subscription service, Kindle Unlimited, which started last summer, now features more than 800,000 e-book titles and thousands of audiobooks for $10 a month.

By adding services, like the ability to listen to audiobooks and buy e-books, Scribd and Oyster are trying to patch over significant holes in their catalogs. So far, both companies have agreements with HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster to include their digital books in their subscription services, but not with Penguin Random House or Hachette.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Scribd Adds to Audiobook Selections. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe